Schools are a particularly interesting institution in any community, because the first thing they have is facilities, and they also have digital infrastructure, and those are two critical things to begin with. For instance, if you have education in journalism in the schools, they can be used to start covering the local community. They can then also be linked to other organizations in the community to build this up and do better kinds of information provision in order to have a useful site.
There's a site in Finland that I visited, and that's run out of a school. The community supports it. The school supports it. All of the political parties in town support it, as do others, because it gives them access to the local community by creating a portal that they can all use. That is really important for discussion of local issues and other things that are going on. On top of it, all the local businesses and all the churches and organizations that are having activities want to use it. It builds community engagement because “this is our place”.
Schools can play a really important role by facilitating and bringing those people together to make that link.